Friday, December 03, 2004

SCAT, the Hole, and the Milky Way

Behind the Hole was Mickey’s Way Creek. The common joke was that the Hole’s urinals drained into it, thus the name. The fact was that the creek had been named Mee-Ki-Wa, after a 17th-century Cusabo chieftain, but no one knew how to spell it, and over time it became Mickey’s Way. Some of the locals called it Milky Way Creek because of its cloudy white color. On the creek bank stood an abandoned shed with the painted word DIOGENES and a horseshoe over the door. That’s where the first official SCAT meeting was held.

Late that night, Flint Locke called a nationally syndicated radio talk show. Identifying himself as “Chert” and with an empty Mickey’s Big Mouth bottle held near the mouthpiece to distort his voice, he laid out for the first time what he kept referring to as the Great Delusion. Flint didn’t understand that most of his listeners thought the term self-descriptive. But all he could think about were those holograms and what he was pretty sure the physicists called gluons.

Fast Eddie and his crew rolled in shortly after the nascent SCAT members headed out back. Fuzzy, Finn-Dog, and Flash made up the crew, and they quickly converged on Cosmic Baseball after ordering drinks.